The solar industry and its 230,000+ workers have faced unprecedented challenges in 2017, but the market is also showing its resilience.

Image: Swinerton Renewable Energy

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There is no doubt that this has been a dramatic year for the U.S. solar market. We’ve not just had one crisis to deal with; We’ve had many, most of which either originate from or center on the pro-coal and nuclear administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

In looking back over the year, there are a number of issues that we delved into in depth, and in this article we are going to take a look at the top 5 stories pv magazine USA covered in 2017.

Section 201

Both the biggest story of 2017 and the biggest potential impact on the U.S. solar market come in the form of the Section 201 trade case filed by Suniva in April and joined by SolarWorld later.

Before we saw the filing, pv magazine USA staff didn’t even know that Section 201 – a massive loophole in the multinational trade agreements signed by the United States over the last few decades – even existed.

Through this arcane legal maneuver, Suniva and SolarWorld asked for a combination of import tariffs and either quotas or a minimum price on pv cells and modules from pretty much any foreign nation. These trade actions would double current prices on imported PV cells and modules, and the quota could put a hard stop on market growth in the next few years.

But if the mechanism for addressing the dominance of imported solar in the U.S. market is new, the issue driving it isn’t. Prior to the launch of the USA site, pv magazine journalists spent years covering the previous two trade cases launched by SolarWorld, as well as the decimation of Western PV makers who could not compete with low-cost imports.

President Trump looks likely to impose strong trade remedies, which GTM Research and IHS have warned could have severe impacts on the U.S. solar market. However, it is also probable that at least some cell and module makers will relocate to the United States. And while this is unlikely to result in the the same volume of jobs which could be lost to a market slowdown, there is the potential to bring back supply chains to accompany this manufacturing.

It’s notable that one of the other huge stories in 2017 has pretty much nothing to do with the Trump Administration. Starting in the first quarter of this year, the U.S. residential solar market began to decline, and as of Q3 has remained below the level of the previous year. This is the first time this decade that this market has slowed year-over-year for three consecutive quarters.

The slowdown was particularly notable in California, where torrential winter rains, changes to net metering and other factors created the perfect storm for rooftop solar. However, it is likely that the biggest factor nationally was not rain, or even net metering, but instead the pull-back of two of the nation’s three largest residential solar companies, Tesla/SolarCity and Vivint Solar.

With both of these companies moving away from aggressive expansion and the third-party-owned solar model, markets across the United States have suffered, and the slowdown in California and the Northeast has more than offset the expansion into new markets like Florida

In keeping with Trump’s promise to bring back coal and the political positions of the pro-fossil fuel cronies and industry shills that he has appointed to cabinet positions, the Trump Administration had made a major move to attempt to create subsidies for the nation’s uncompetitive coal and nuclear plants through federal agencies.

This began with a study at the U.S. Department of Energy regarding the state of the grid and the role of so-called ‘baseload’ power in reliability. But perhaps in part because a draft of the study was leaked, the final version did not end up supporting the conclusion that such plants were actually needed for reliability.

This did not stop Energy Secretary Perry, who has attempted to ram a rule to bailout of coal and nuclear plants through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) has not gone exactly smoothly either, with critical voices including eight former commissioners and chairs at FERC noting that the attempt to provide compensation for 90-day supplies of fuel at coal and nuclear power plants not only addresses a problem that does not exist, but would “blow up” wholesale power markets.

In December incoming FERC Chair KevinMcIntyre has won an additional 30 days to try to come up with something like a rule to subsidize “fuel secure” generation. It remains to be seen what the ultimate outcome of this intellectually dishonest attempt to prop up dying forms of power will be.

As if the threat of tariffs and a massive bailout of coal and nuclear plants wasn’t bad enough, in November Congressional Republicans embarked on a controversial and partisan effort to rewrite to tax code.

There were multiple scares along the way for clean energy, including threats to the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind, a near-roll back of electric vehicle tax credits, and a host of other concerns. But while most of these were addressed in the House and Senate, the Senate bill introduced a new provision, the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT), that threatened to make the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) useless to many of the largest tax equity investors.

In an 11th-hour arrangemen,t the application of the BEAT provision to the ITC and PTC was significantly watered down. However, the new tax package, which is on the way to be signed by President Trump, contains a host of changes to the tax code which will affect the profitability of renewable energy projects, the value of tax credits, and clean energy finance.

Had enough bad news yet? Good, because so have we – and it wasn’t all bad news this year. The last major theme for our 2017 coverage is that even with the major roadblocks for clean energy that have been produced by Trump and Congressional Republicans, prices for solar and batteries have largely continued their downward trajectory.

Reports by National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) and IHS Markit have documented the dramatic fall in both technologies, with utility-scale solar prices falling to just around $1 per watt this year, aided by the collapse in module prices. Additionally data from California shows that contract prices for large-scale solar under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard fell to an average of $29 per megawatt-hour in 2016.

And while the second half of the year system prices appear to have come back up because of scarcity pricing for modules as fallout from the Section 201 case, this appears to be a temporary phenomenon. Other aspects of system prices continue to fall, and solar remains on a long-term trajectory of price declines.

Falling prices are the core of the unstoppable market momentum of solar and battery. As we have noted before, even the president of the United States can’t stop the Energy Transition.

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Christian Roselund

Christian Roselund served as US editor at pv magazine from 2014 to 2019. Prior to this he covered global solar policy, markets and technology for Solar Server, and has written about renewable energy for CleanTechnica, German Energy Transition, Truthout, The Guardian (UK), and IEEE Spectrum.

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